MIC Global’s Embedded Insurance Thesis: Why Point-of-Sale Beats Push Marketing

MIC Global’s Embedded Insurance Thesis: Why Point-of-Sale Beats Push Marketing

You’re booking a flight. Right before checkout, a checkbox appears: “Protect your baggage for $10.” You tick it without thinking. That’s embedded insurance.

Now imagine instead you had to leave the airline’s website, visit an insurance broker, compare comprehensive travel policies with 48 different clauses, pay $500, then return to book your flight. You’d never do it.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Harry Croydon, Co-Founder of MIC Global, an embedded microinsurance company that’s raised over $13 million, explained why this distinction—between insurance that flows naturally with the purchase versus insurance that interrupts it—is everything.

The term “embedded insurance” has become buzzwordy, thrown around by every company putting an insurance offer on their website. But MIC Global’s approach reveals what embedded insurance actually means and why most companies get it completely wrong.

The Old Model: Push Marketing

Traditional insurance operates on a push model. Insurance companies create comprehensive policies with extensive coverage, then try to convince people they need them.

Harry describes the problem perfectly: “I’ve got travel insurance, it’s got 48 clauses in it. You ought to buy this. It’s $500. No, I only want late flight and baggage. That’s $10. And that’s a simple kind of product to buy. More relevant to most holiday travelers, if you like.”

The insurance company is pushing their product down the distribution channel, hoping to find customers who want all 48 clauses. The customer wants two specific things and doesn’t want to pay for coverage they’ll never use.

This creates friction at every step. The customer has to understand complex policy language. They have to compare options across multiple providers. They have to make decisions about coverage they don’t fully understand. And they have to do all this separately from whatever they were actually trying to buy.

Program Insurance: The Old Version of Embedded

The insurance industry’s first attempt at solving this was program insurance—creating specific insurance products for specific distribution channels or customer segments.

“There’s been many years there’s been program insurance selling programs to companies,” Harry explains. These programs made insurance more targeted, but they didn’t fundamentally change the customer experience.

Program insurance still operated on push mechanics. The insurance was more relevant, but customers still had to actively engage with it as a separate purchase decision. It was better than generic policies, but it wasn’t truly embedded.

True Embedded Insurance: Pull, Not Push

Harry draws a critical distinction: “The embedded nature is really similar to that, but different. Right. So the way we, you know, definitely embedded microinsurance, but it’s the way it’s placed into the channel, into the actual sales channel of the product.”

The key is placement within the customer journey. Not adjacent to it. Not after it. Within it.

“So it’s allowing insurance to be sold right at the point of sale with another product that is relevant to the insurance sale. So we’re not pushing some old product down somebody’s throat, if you like. It’s allowing the customer to go on his journey to buy whatever product they’re looking at.”

This is the fundamental shift from push to pull. The customer is already making a purchase decision. The insurance becomes a natural extension of that decision, not a separate one.

The Rental Insurance Example

Harry uses rental insurance to illustrate how this works in practice: “Let’s say they’re buying. You know, in our case, we rental, they’re buying, taking a rent policy, a rental contract. Then as they take that out, we position my income product in that sales flow.”

The mechanics matter: “So that when they come to sort of agree to pay fifteen hundred dollars a month for their rent, then we can also cover them for their loss of. If they lose their job, we can cover them for $1,500 a month for three or four months as well for a premium.”

The insurance solves an obvious problem that the primary transaction creates. You’re committing to $1,500 monthly rent. What happens if you lose your job? The insurance addresses that exact concern at the exact moment you’re thinking about it.

“So that people can then think, oh, I got my rent. Oh, this is a good product. It protects me in case I lose my job. You know, ticked by that. And it’s all within the flow. They don’t have to think about it by going to a broker or going somewhere else. You know, it’s all within that sort of flow to buy the insurance.”

Why Simplicity Enables Embedding

True embedded insurance requires radical simplicity. You can’t embed a 48-clause policy into a checkout flow. The cognitive load is too high. The decision becomes too complex.

Harry’s examples are deliberately simple. Lost baggage coverage. Income protection equal to your rent payment. These are single-purpose products with clear value propositions.

“To do that, you need a very relevant and very simple product to sell and position there,” Harry emphasizes. “And it allows the customer to pull that product along with what they want, rather than the insurance company pushing it down.”

This is the core insight: embedded insurance inverts the traditional insurance sales model. Instead of pushing comprehensive coverage and hoping customers want it, you let customers pull exactly the coverage they need at exactly the moment they need it.

The Airline Example Everyone Knows

The shift is already happening in travel. “Another one you see often is like a lost luggage insurance when you’re buying an airline ticket. You know, it comes in the flow. You don’t buy travel insurance kind of separately anymore. You go and buy it in the flow.”

This seems obvious now, but it represents a complete transformation from how travel insurance worked a decade ago. Back then, buying travel insurance meant a separate transaction with a separate company, comparing comprehensive policies you didn’t fully understand.

Now it’s a checkbox. The insurance is still there, but it’s frictionless.

Why This Model Works for Platforms

MIC Global built their entire business around embedded microinsurance because they recognized where the world was heading. Platform businesses—Uber, Airbnb, rental platforms, gig economy marketplaces—need insurance that works the way their platforms work.

These platforms can’t interrupt their user experience to send customers to insurance brokers. They can’t ask users to fill out lengthy applications. They need insurance that appears at the right moment, offers relevant coverage, and disappears if declined.

“So that’s where the embedded nature, the change that I see from just being program insurance, which is what people think of as embedded insurance to what we think of as embedded insurance is embedding it into the final point of sale, if you like,” Harry explains.

The final point of sale is critical. Not before. Not after. At the exact moment when the customer’s need is most acute and their willingness to act is highest.

The Economics of Microinsurance

This model only works economically because of microinsurance. Traditional insurance policies have high operational overhead. The cost of underwriting, servicing, and managing a policy is substantial. That overhead gets amortized across annual premiums and comprehensive coverage.

Microinsurance flips this. The policies are smaller, shorter, and simpler. But technology makes them economically viable. Automated underwriting, instant policy issuance, and digital claims processing reduce operational costs to nearly zero.

This enables the $10 baggage coverage that would never work under traditional insurance economics. The margin per policy is tiny, but the volume is massive and the operational cost approaches zero.

The Future of Insurance Distribution

Harry sees embedded microinsurance as the future of how insurance reaches mass markets: “Being able to do that quickly, efficiently and manage it all on technology will enable insurance to penetrate, you know, the mass markets, not just in America and South America, but around the world.”

The model works because it aligns with how people actually make decisions. When you’re booking a flight, you’re thinking about travel. When you’re signing a rental agreement, you’re thinking about rent. Insurance that appears in those moments, addressing those specific concerns, gets purchased.

Insurance sold separately, requiring separate research and separate decisions, increasingly doesn’t.

The Principle Beyond Insurance

MIC Global’s embedded insurance thesis applies beyond insurance. Any product that solves a problem created or highlighted by another transaction can be embedded similarly.

The requirements are the same: extreme relevance to the primary transaction, radical simplicity in the offer, and seamless integration into the purchase flow.

The fundamental insight is about customer psychology. People don’t want to buy insurance. They want protection from specific risks at specific moments. Give them that—nothing more, nothing less—at the exact moment they need it, and they’ll pull it into their purchase naturally.

That’s embedded insurance. Everything else is just program insurance with better marketing.